When Michael Cimino died in 2016, I expressed an ardent wish to read a well-researched and sympathetic biography of him. Here it is: Charles Elton’s “Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision” is as engaging, as fascinating, as revelatory, and as melancholy as one might expect.

The book, which was published in March by Abrams, has two main themes: first, how the director’s career was slaughtered by critics’ mockery of his masterwork, “Heaven’s Gate,” when it premièred, in 1980; second, that Cimino presented as a woman, at least in private, for part of the last twenty-five years of his life.